Garbage In Garbage Out : Tech Blog

Apple’s new iOS 5 includes a feature that allows text messages to be delivered directly to iOS devices, bypassing your carrier’s cellular network completely. It’s nice, insofar as it includes delivery confirmation messages. So, iPhones know when a message is being sent to another iPhone, and automatically uses this new service called iMessage. The downside [...]

I recently needed to change the permissions of all files inside a directory, including subdirectories. From the command line in Mac OS X, I ran this command with success which changed all files recursively to 666 (rw-rw-rw-): sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 666 {} \; Likewise, to change only directories to 777 (rwxrwxrwx), [...]

Apache runs very slowly in Mac OS X 10.7.1 Lion. I checked out the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file and noticed that Apple shipped Lion with every single module turned on, meaning Apache is chewing up a lot of memory and CPU cycles on modules that (typically) aren’t needed! Here’s how to reclaim the speed of Snow Leopard [...]

Good news out of Cupertino. Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion ships with a newer version of PHP (5.3.6), which has been compiled with GD, freetype, tidy (libtidy), and lots of other goodness. Additionally, Apple has chosen to compile PHP with Suhosin Patch 0.9.10, which purports to substantially harden PHP. From the [...]

Apache on Mac OS X is configured with security in mind. Apple has chosen to ship it with a setting that causes the x-frame-options header to be sent, which has the effect of causing content hosted on a Mac OS X server to not show up inside and iframe on another site. Well-written web apps [...]

You can easily install the PHP SSH2 extension to PHP5 on Mac OS X Server to support the new CDN features of SocialEngine 4.1.6. Here’s how: Download and install MacPorts from http://macports.org. The following steps are performed in the Terminal: Force MacPorts to update: sudo port -v selfupdate Now, install memcached: sudo port install php5-ssh2

Mac OS X 10.6 snow leopard uses the bash shell by default. If you install MySQL from the disk image (dmg) from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/, you can make it easy to access the mysql binary from the command line by adding it to your bash path. Here’s how: Open terminal, and type: echo ‘export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH’ >> ~/.bash_profile [...]

You can easily install the mcrypt extension to PHP5 on Mac OS X Server. Here’s how: Download and install MacPorts from http://macports.org. The following steps are performed in the Terminal: Force MacPorts to update: sudo port -v selfupdate Now, install memcached: sudo port install php5-mcrypt Copy the newly created shared object for mcrypt into Mac [...]

Looking to speed up your SocialEngine, Drupal, or other PHP/MySQL web site? The combination of APC and Memcache can really speed up sites based on these platforms. If you’re an admin of a server running Mac OS X Server (10.6), here’s how to install APC and memcache on Mac OS X server: Download and install [...]

Did you upgrade to Maya 2010 because you found that you couldn’t install Maya 2009 on Snow Leopard 10.6? Are you finding that Maya 2010 on Snow Leopard is flakey, giving you lots of rainbow beach balls? No worries. Ian Herzog over on MacLearning.org has the answer, and it’s simple as tweaking the Maya 2009 [...]